La Façon Dont Nous Vivons Maintenant
There aren’t very many good architecture critics and there aren’t very many good restaurant critics and there certainly aren’t very many critics who know their onion domes as well as their onions. Jonathan Meades is one. Café Antonia in Hôtel Le Bristol is too new to have been included in his lively 2002 Restaurant Guide but, to give you a flavour, he critiques three of our all time Parisian favourites. Way back in 2008 we hit one of the French Capital’s most vertigo inducing restaurants: Le Jules Verne, Eiffel Tower, which he awarded 7 sur 10. “The immediate views of this vertical Forth Bridge are captivating. And even were the restaurant situated at street level, it would still be worth patronising. The cooking is precise, considered, mostly balanced. Haughtily offhand service.” Le Jules Verne was where we first tasted the delights of the vineyard of St Véran which would become our tipple of choice at the Oxford and Cambridge Club London.
A few years later, Parisienne socialite Maud Rabanne introduced us to her regular and we haven’t stopped revisiting it since: Le Meurice, Rue de Rivoli, 8 sur 10. “The hotel is a Versailles for the bourgeoise. The building is so large, so labyrinthine, and there is just so much of everything – marble, glass, mirror, gold – that cornucopia soon becomes the norm. The dining room is staffed by several armies of tailed waiters and equipped with no end of trolleys and incendiary devices. The cooking excels when it tends toward the down-home – rather incongruous in such a setting – but disappoints when going in for conventional grand hotel stuff. There’s one problem: the pianist. Shoot?”
Memorably, the day after Notre Dame went up in smoke, we lunched in L’Orangerie, one of three restaurants in the Four Seasons George V, Avenue George V, 10 sur 10. “The George V should really be called the Louis after Louis the decorator. Containerloads of tapestries, gilded console tables, marble busts, rococo mirrors and so on have been brought from Rue St Honoré. The place is bursting with everything save self restraint. It does without saying that the restaurant does swell lines in pomp and neo directoire pediments. Two sorts of salt, two sorts of butter, absolutely no chance of pouring your own wine. The cooking is sumptuous, magnificent, not least because it quite lacks the chichi that mars much hotel cooking. Wines: predictably big names at predictably big prices.”
And that brings us on rather nicely to a big name of the landscaping world. They don’t come much bigger than the Italian born Pimlico office based Lady Arabella Lennox-Boyd. She hasn’t looked back since studying landscape architecture at Thames Polytechnic. In 2018, the then 82 year old was commissioned to redesign Le Bristol’s courtyard garden. “I wanted to get away from the usual hotel good taste with the ubiquitous formal white and green theme.” Instead, she introduced a pastoral idea combining topiary with loose plantings and flowing grasses. “A countryside feeling in the city.” She also wanted “a sense of mystery so that the garden cannot be seen in its entirety from any one point”.
While the façade of Le Bristol is a serious urban presence in stone, the inner facing elevations are light creamy stucco. What would have been a blank party wall in the courtyard garden has been given the green treatment. Forget a mere green wall. This is more like a two storey green mountain of layered planting towering behind first floor level pyramidal topiary set perpendicular to the courtyard garden.
“It was quite unconventional for a Roman girl whose role it was to get married and produce children and maybe have a job as a lawyer. Instead of which I’m in gardens doing manual work and dealing with soil. I have a feel for plants; I have a connection. I sometimes put myself in their shoes: if I was them what would I want?” She smiles, “You’re never too old!”
The landscape designer selected flora native to the greater Paris region or France more broadly, including European beech and hornbeam, Gladwin iris and hart’s tongue fern. “I included plants that provide shelter and nectar in all seasons. This garden is colonised by nature.” Rectangular black slate fountains add to this sensory driven garden. “Designing a garden is like painting with plants but there is so much more to consider. I am proud to have created a space where things are planted according to their natural habitat.” Her little black book includes King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium, the Duke and Duchess of Westminster, and of course the Oetker family who own Le Bristol.
Lady Arabella’s great chum Countess Bergit Douglas, a relative of the Oetkers, masterminded the Louis XVI interior design of the three Haussmannesque buildings that make up Le Bristol. The hotel has never looked better since Hippolyte Jammet (great name!) opened it in 1923. He must have been something of an Anglophile, naming his hotel after Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, an 18th century connoisseur of luxury travel. The socialite Lady Victoria Hervey is a descendant although the family have long since lost their seat of Ickworth in Suffolk. The dazzling and dazzlingly talented Josephine Baker and her pet cheetah frequented Le Bristol throughout the Roaring Twenties. After a postwar spell as the American Embassy, the hotel was bought by German businessman Rudolf Oetker in 1978. Then in 2014, our Knightsbridge London hangout The Lanesborough became part of The Oetker Collection. Little wonder Le Bristol feels like a home from home.
C’est le déjeuner sur l’herbe encore une fois. That ultimate Parisienne (if not born one soon became one) is the muse of Café Antonia in Le Bristol. Yes, Marie Antoinette. Her mother’s pet name for her was Antonia. Françoise Ravelle revels in Marie Antoinette Queen of Style and Taste (2017), “She singled out creators who had the knack of lifting their art to the height of perfection, and she became closely involved in the design of her dresses, her furniture and her gardens. In the small kingdom of Marie Antoinette her ministers were her couturiers, cabinetmakers, bronze works and painters.” The 18th century Royals’ painter François-Hubert Drouais’ portrait of Marie Antoinette, part of the private collection of Le Bristol, presides over Café Antonia. Her Majesty was passionate about the arts and loved attending the Opéra de Paris where she could escape the Court’s strict etiquette. Café Antonia reflects this sophisticated yet informal outlook, flowing from an expansive drawing room through French doors into the courtyard garden.
Françoise Ravelle reveals, “Perhaps Marie Antoinette’s personal touch is her association with a forever bygone epoch, described by her artist friend Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, ‘Women reigned at the time – the Revolution dethroned them.’” Females are taking central roles at Le Bristol, from the garden creator to the garniture stylist to the beau monde guests. True to form, there are plenty of Catherine Deneuve and Kristin Scott Thomas doppelgangers holding court in Café Antonia making elegance an art form. And some gentlemen of class as well. “De riens, messieurs,” waves our waiter. Lunch is all about crème d’asperges vertes, avocat; oeuf poché sur toast et saumon fumé; and patisserie du jour (chocolat, beaucoup de chocolat!).
Bob Middleton arrives and whisks us off on a whistlestop tour of the hotel. “I am the Manager of 114 which is one of three food offers in Hôtel Le Bristol excluding the banqueting and the room service. The name comes from its address: 114 Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré. We opened in 2009 and the restaurant has one Michelin star since 2013. There is also the three Michelin star restaurant Epicure overlooking the courtyard garden. Vincent Schmit is our Head Chef in 114 and he is assisted by 25 people who work in the kitchen. Then we have 30 people who work in the restaurant itself. We have a great place, we have a great team, we have great customers, what more can I say?” Vincent Schmit waves up from the lower level kitchen. “Bonne journée!”
And how would Jonathan Meades mark Café Antonia? Bien sûr 10 sur 10.
